Previously we showed that Fugazi had a few songs that they played a lot and a number of songs that they played pretty infrequently. In this post we look at what those songs were.
The graph below shows all of Fugazi’s songs, plotted by the percentage of shows where the song was played. I include a vertical line representing the average across all songs (19.4%) and draw drop lines from each point to the average.
A couple things are obvious right away. First, it’s really hard to plot this many discrete points. We’ll fix that in a moment. Second, and more to the point, there is clearly a cluster of 14 songs that are played far and away more than others. We zoom in on those songs in the next chart.
Within the most played 14 sogs there are five songs that were played in more than 50% of Fugazi’s shows. Three (Blueprint, Reclamation, and Waiting Room) were played in 65% or more of live shows. And one song stands out as their most popular song to play lived: Waiting Room, which was played live in more than 70% of their shows.
No great surprises here. Waiting room was song one on their first EP. Seems pretty natural that it would have been played most frequently. And the other songs are all some of my favorites. I’m a little surprised that only one song from In on the Kill Taker made it onto the list and it was Rend It (I would have guessed Cassavetes or Smallpox Champion), but still, nothing on the list is shocking. Most of the top songs are among my favorites, at least from the first few albums
Indeed the top 14 are dominated by songs from 13 Songs and Repeater +3. This also is not surprising; You can’t play a song live if you haven’t written it. Nevertheless, there definitely seems to be some clustering by album going on here. We’ll take a closer look at that in the next post.
If you want, you can listen to the top 14 Fugazi tracks below.
(Next Fugazi post)